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I’ve been getting up to twenty missed calls a day from the same 0207 number. They’ve been at it for weeks and they never leave a message. I’ve no intention of answering; they’ve been reported as a nuisance caller on some online forums and – huzzah! – I’ve just figured out how to block numbers on the phone I’ve only had for about two years. I’m not amongst the most tech-savvy of my generation. Then again, it’s nice that I haven’t needed the block function until now.

So, last night’s dream. I was with X, a lady I know through Bollywood dance. She’s a little older than me, and very mild-tempered. The same 0207 number came up on my phone and I fucking lost it. My rag, I mean. Not my phone. X looked remonstratively at me as I laid into the person on the other end. Yeah I know they’re trying to make a living like everyone else. I was sorry to be swearing and raging like this in front of her, when she’d always thought I was a nice and gentle person. At the same time I felt resentful; nobody knew how much I’d had to put up with and who was X or anyone else to judge me for my fury?

wtf, subconscious?

This was old rage, man. Rage, and also despair. I felt so powerless to stop these intrusions into my privacy and the aggressiveness of the cold-callers. What did I care if this particular trigger-happy sales-targeteer was kind of a scapegoat for so many others.

When I think about why it was X who cropped up in my dream – someone I don’t know all that well – I recall that I do know she had an unhappy marriage. Considering this is a woman who almost never has a bad word for anyone, I’ve heard her describe her ex-husband in pretty strong terms.

Over the years, it’s not only belligerent sales-badgers who’ve bounded across my boundaries. This dream was the anger equivalent of the fear I felt in ok, computer. Both dreams featured shame or guilt. I feel ashamed to be heard expressing my anger. I feel guilt at the thought that I might really be in the wrong. So X has a conflicting role in this dream. She probably knows a thing or three about anger, and yet I worried about offending her with mine. It’s still so hard not to feel ashamed.

Some time last week, I dreamt I had a bald patch gaping at the crown of my head. Two nights ago, I was walking around in a shortish skirt with my legs making no attempt to look shaven. (On the subject of legs, in the same night I also dreamt that I couldn’t kick as high as some of my dance comrades, which indeed I can’t.)

My hair dreams had settled down recently, but about a year ago I had a rash of them – I saw myself losing hair from my head and eyebrows, while growing a winter coat across legs, chin, breasts, belly. Oh, and there was that time when I had a long soak in the bath at my (then new) shared house, then left the bathroom not realising I’d left a light but even covering of pubic hair in the tub….

Induction day for my MSc course, although the building it was in was a cross between the sixth form block at my school, and an NHS outpatients’ centre I once worked at as a secretary. My Dad drove me there although it was only a few miles down the road. It was in an uninspiring suburb of the city, surrounded by a large car park. The main road there was congested. I was the last to arrive and the other students were already settled at long trestle tables and were eating from a buffet.

Surrounded by 18-20 year olds who first assumed I was a similar age and reacted with unflattering surprise to finding out how old I actually am, I felt embarassed that my career isn’t further along. I felt they were looking at me thinking they would be mortified to be in my position at my age.

We were directed to play ice-breaking / team-building games outdoors on the back lawn. It was a sunny day, and I loitered by the outer edges, feeling out-of-place and looked down upon. I felt I may have made the wrong decision in coming back to university, not only because I was out-youthed, but that the course was too basic and not covering my real interests. I couldn’t show those around me my strengths, and the experiences I had – which my coursemates didn’t – were not recognised.

wtf, subconscious?

Well, this one doesn’t need much interpretation. The insecurities that crop up here are real and self-explanatory, albeit not as prominent in my conscious mind as in this dream.

My dad would drive me to university if I had to move away for it – although in the dream, the campus was only a short bus ride away, and in reality, though it will involve a bit of a commute, I’ve no intentions of moving out of my current house. I see the being-driven as a metaphor for the help that my dad – a lecturer at another university – is helping me in getting back to academia.

The symbol of being on a busy, congested or slow journey is a common one in people’s dreams. Easy enough to see the analogy. In this case, I also had a sense of guilt that my dad was putting himself out, when I could have made my own way to campus and in fact probably would have got there more easily.

It’s only as I’m writing these dreams up that I’m seeing the links that my subconscious mind makes between different times of my life, and how they affect me now. The locations – sixth form, and my former workplace – tell me that I’m still feeling sore about being underestimated, undermined or unrecognised in those places.

As for the buffet, we could explore the symbolic meaning of food – nourishment and all that – but I dunno, I’m happy enough to say that I just fricking love food.